Favourite Quotation: “I don’t like being out of the crowd. It’s lonely within a group.” – Julie Walters

Friends: 986

Facebook Newsfeed: Lucy Mason accepted your friend request

James: One more for the friend count. Racking up the popularity points

Reality: You’ve never even spoken to the girl. She’s a friend of a friend that you saw at a party once. You just clicked “Add Friend” on your friend recommendations page. Why did you do this? Because you think that you get some sort of satisfaction from having a high friend count. You think people are impressed and will consider you to be popular. Does your Facebook friend count have any bearing on the quality of you as an individual? You are “friends” with people but could you even look them in the eye in the real world?

Tweet: Hey there all my followers! Going to the gym now and pump some iron. Getting ripped!!!

James: If I tell people what I’m doing maybe someone will want to go with me or maybe I’ll even see someone there. I’ll tag my location on my iPhone when I get to the gym. That way I might bump into someone I know.

Reality: #noonerespondsandnoonecares #attentionseaker

Facebook Photo Tag: Remove tag immediately.

James: This one’s not such a great picture of me. Not exactly Profile-Picture-Worthy! Maybe I’ll Photoshop some of those sweat marks from the picture and then retag myself.

Reality: The problem with photos on people’s profiles is that they can decide what pictures they want to allow their “friends” to see. The set of photos is therefore biased and hence not a fair depiction of the person. Is it sad that some people feel the need to airbrush their own photos? Have we really become this vain and shallow? It is as if with the ability to make more relationships through social media we are more afraid than ever of what people will think of us, so we hide in plain sight.

Event Invitation: Come to my 21st Birthday! It’s on 03/07/12 at my house at 9.30pm, let me know if you can make it!

James: I’ll just respond as “Maybe”. That way I am not committed and can make my decision as and when the time comes. I’ll see who else is going first.

Reality: This is just plain rude. Would anyone think about replying to an invite for a birthday in the real world with a “Maybe”? It’s even worse if you ignore the invite altogether. It is strange that our increased ability to connect with others has made it more acceptable to ignore each other.

LinkedIn: Reconnect with Dan Passer?

James: He’s my old school friend’s dad. I think he’s a partner at that big financial firm. I should add him on LinkedIn. Maybe he’ll help me get a job when I get out of college.

Reality: How are you going to follow up this connection? You don’t know him. You’ve never actually met him. He probably doesn’t know who you are. Just linking with him does not make him a business partner. That takes time, work, and effort. Linking on LinkedIn is no substitute for these. With the ability to make better business connections we appear to find it more acceptable to make less of an effort. Technology should improve our business relationships, not weaken them.

Tweet: Republicans can rot in Hell!

James: I can say what I like on twitter because it’ll never get back to me. I’m using my alias account @ReliableRanter.

Reality: You’re afraid of what others may think of your opinions. Using an alias makes you believe that you can say whatever you like about anyone and anything without repercussions. Can we ignore our responsibility towards our actions simply because we have concealed our true identity?

Facebook Chat: There are 58 of your friends online

James: Who should I chat with? Who haven’t I spoken to in a while.

Reality: You can’t talk to any of them. You don’t know any of them well enough. What would you say to them to start a conversation in reality? There are only a handful of your Facebook “friends” that you would actually talk to and none are currently online. So then what are these 58 people to you?

Facebook Profile

Name: James Solely

Birthday: September 15, 1991

Sex: Male

Interested In: Women

Religious Views: Atheist

Political Views: Other

Favourite Quotation: “I don’t like being out of the crowd. It’s lonely within a group.” – Julie Walters

Fake friends: 986

Real Friends: 0

With Social Media we are now connected with more people than ever before and yet we have never been more alone. It is not the quantity of acquaintances that matters but the quality of the relationship.

The YWC’s goal is to award money to deserving contestants who will use the funds to further their education. The money can go towards tuition, books, application fees, and other costs which make furthering one’s education cumbersome at times. Although you cannot touch education, we believe education is critical to success. It’s often hard to see the value of that which we cannot see, but we can promise that education is fundamental in getting a job in a field you like, building a business, and giving you the optionality to do more!

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I give this a score of 2, as it highlights that the whole social network thing is being over-hyped.

You read bloggers boasting about their Twitter reach, however not all followers are logged on 24 hours a day waiting to read every tweet from that blogger.

I attended a blogger event earlier this week and hardly anyone was actually physically networking as they were mainly glued to their ihpones and tables furiously typing tweets. Surely they could have done that from home, why bother coming to an event?

Funny. Guys will try to friend you based on the way you look. I had a robot try to friend me. I didn’t know who it was so I checked out the page. On the page, it said that the robot was a digitally created image to see how many guys would friend her.

Guess her 1000+ followers didn’t care who she was. They just wanted to be “connected”.

Hi Financial Samurai, I don’t think there is much of a difference between men and women’s interactions on FB and SM. It is my belief that we are all sucked into this vortex of SM. For some strange reason many of us are addicted to the potentially unlimited attention we get from it. I myself struggle with this addiction as I’m sure we all do. I’m not arguing that SM doesn’t have its uses, only that we are unclear where the boundary is between a use and an addiction that is damaging the way we traditionally interacted with each other. Whether or not this change in the way we interact is a bad thing is up to you to decide; as for the existence of the change, I believe that that is indisputable.

Beating Broke (and to some of the other comments), please take what you want from the essay. I purposely wrote it in a way that you can read as much as you like into it. For example, some people may notice that his name is Soley meaning loneliness. Some may have picked up on this some may have not. It does not matter either way. People are free to take from it whatever message they desire. The purpose was to bring to light the changing nature of our social interactions. As for your interpretation, well that’s up to you. I hope that helped a little?

I had over 600 “friends” at one time. I deleted the majority and now have 61. Funny. The most viewed post on my blog is “how to mass delete or unfriend multiple Facebook friends.” My deletion criteria was, if I haven’t talked to you on the phone or in person on a friend level in more than a couple months, we’re probably not friends. As for Twitter, i mostly follow bloggers or financial news/gurus.

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